Author Ian O’Connor has taken a close look at the life of Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers. It’s been clear from the pre-publication publicity that the biography is unauthorized. And it’s an easy, yes-or-no question as to whether it is.
Of course, when Rodgers was asked that easy, yes-or-no question by WFAN on Tuesday morning, the answer wasn’t easy.
Question: Is the biography authorized or not authorized?
“That’s a rhetorical question, is it not?” Rodgers said, via AwfulAnnouncing.com. “Is it not?”
It’s not. It’s a real question. And it’s obvious that it’s not authorized. But Rodgers nevertheless sat for an interview with the writer of the unauthorized biography.
That gave him a chance to add his two cents to the record, while also reserving the right to dispute anything in the book that he doesn’t like.
“He did a lot of research,” Rodgers said regarding O’Connor. “It has nothing to do with me. But he did a lot of research on his own. He’s done other books with other famous people in sports. I think he reached out to 500 people and talked to maybe half those people.
“At the end before, although he’d already written I believe a first draft, we had a conversation, sat down. It was more just kind of him asking a few things. A lot of the stuff that was in there I mean is 20-plus years old. And I commend him for the time he spent on it, but it’s not a book I asked him to write for me. He wrote it on his own, and there will be some interesting things in there that are perspective-based, for sure be some stuff that’s true. . . .
“I commend him. He was trying to do a really good job, and get the entire picture. But you have to put everything into context.”
O’Connor did a sufficiently good job to teach Rodgers things he didn’t know about his own grandfather, including the fact that his grandfather went to the University of Texas at Austin. (How he hadn’t tripped over that specific fact in nearly 41 years of life is a different issue.)
The book seems to have plenty of good stuff. And Rodgers seems to be primarily interested in having the ability to embrace the good, and to dismiss the bad.